Quitting Porn to Save Your Sex Life

Quitting porn to save your sex life? It might surprise you to learn that porn can actually be a huge turn-off.

Literally.

Far from making you into some kind of sex god, research has shown that habitual porn use can make it difficult or even impossible to perform sexually with a real, human partner. Skeptical? Read on.

Constant porn use can cause erectile dysfunction.

When pornography is viewed, your brain releases dopamine, a feel-good chemical that keeps you coming back for more. Frequent and escalating porn use can blunt dopamine receptors over time, which can lead to problems like erectile dysfunction, delayed ejaculation, depression, and anxiety. Yikes. So by rerouting your brain, porn can actually make it more difficult to have decent sex in real life. But don’t worry, you can fix it. Because:

Quitting porn can heal your broken brain AND your broken sex life

Even in brains that have been seriously damaged by porn addiction, “rebooting” can start the road to healing. And it really works! The human brain is plastic: it can grow and heal and change. Expert Gary Wilson states, rebooting is a metaphor taken from the computer world: “By avoiding artificial sexual stimulation [porn] you are shutting down and restarting the brain, restoring it to its original factory settings.” In the absence of this artificial stimuli, the brain can reroute its pathways. When porn is removed, your brain will look for new ways to receive the dopamine high it’s become accustomed to, which can lead to healthier habits and a renewed sensitivity to real-life pleasures. Once these neural pathways have been rerouted to seek pleasure from healthy, real-world sources, erectile function problems often go away completely.

Quitting porn makes you more desirable

Porn does not equal sex. Women in porn do not equal real women. When you quit porn and your brain starts to heal, you will start to see real human females as more attractive and desirable than you did before. Real sex is just not the same thing as sex in pornography, and most women are not looking for a man who gets his ideas about sex and female bodies from a computer screen. What makes you more desirable? Appreciating real women for who they are as people, and all the perfection and imperfection that brings.